300 miles later, the Appalachian Trail is already teaching us lessons the hard way.
It’s been a little less than a month and those 300 miles are behind us. Time here passes as relentlessly as in the city, even if we try to live in the present moment. One moment it feels like we just got here, and the next it feels like we’ve been on the road forever.
At first, I was dealing with a lot of pain and overuse issues in my right leg. IT band inflammation, swollen feet, a squeaky Achilles tendon, and finally my ankle got so bad we had to take two zero days in Gatlinburg. In the end, I decided to buy new shoes and almost overnight things started to improve. Even though I had the same model I used on the CDT, they just didn’t work for me this time and caused me a lot of pain. Shoes are everything here, and this is a good reminder that what worked before may not work again. Your body and even your feet change over time. I would recommend listening to the early warning signs and changing shoes at the first opportunity. I should have done it in Franklin.
With the new shoes, after three weeks, I had my first completely pain-free day. And suddenly everything seems easier. We are slowly getting up to about 20 miles a day and settling into our hiking pace. We feel our hiker legs kick in.
Fuego is already hungry as a hiker. He has lost 20 pounds since the beginning. The other night he had a midnight snack, a 710-calorie honey bun. It’s basically a full midnight lunch. It’s a good thing he’s a pretty modest guy otherwise, because feeding him here could easily turn into a small mortgage.
The trail is slowly changing and we enjoy watching everything come to life. What was initially a sleepy landscape covered in leaves is now turning into a green canvas filled with colorful flowers. We have seen a couple of snakes and signs of bears, but otherwise the wildlife we see every day are mice and squirrels.
Mice have already bitten my bag of food twice, including inside a bear box, but nothing serious. I found a new dry bag in a hiker box, so the problem was solved. The path leads, but it also provides.
In the CDT, the grouse scared us. Here, the squirrels have taken on that role completely. Every time we pass by, they get scared, run up the nearest tree and start making so much noise that it seems like something much bigger. For two minutes straight they run around like crazy. So small and so loud.
This is our third road, our journey to the Triple Crown, and it’s been a pretty wild ride so far. We are in the mood to celebrate and when we are not walking, we enjoy the towns along the way. They come here quite frequently. It almost seems like a reward path.
Compared to the CDT and PCT, the trails are shorter, civilization is always within reach, and getting from the trailheads to the towns is easy and well organized. We didn’t really feel that deep wild isolation here, but we knew from the beginning that the AT isn’t about that.
The community around the trail and the hikers themselves are amazing. Every stop, every conversation by the fire or having a beer has been worth it. Some of the stories people share here are powerful and sometimes even chilling. It’s hard to believe how much effort it takes for some people to get here, how many years others had to wait before they could finally take the path of their dreams from Georgia to Maine.
We share the same gratitude for being here. Although the terrain can be tough, the climbs seem endless, we are dirty, we smell bad and we eat food out of bags, we wouldn’t change this for the world.
Here it is clear how little we really need to be happy.
Hiker trash forever.
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